Northern Ireland
Location of low pay
Key points
- At around 40%, Cookstown, Strabane, Fermanagh and Limavady have the highest proportion of workers who are paid less than £7 per hour. For most districts, the proportion is around 30%.
- 22% of full-time employees in Northern Ireland were paid less than £7 an hour in 2007. This proportion is higher than in any of the regions of Great Britain among whom the next highest proportion (18%) is found in the North East of England.
- By contrast, the proportion of low paid, part-time employees in Northern Ireland was, at 45%, lower than in any of the regions of Great Britain bar the high wage areas of the south of England.
- Taken together, the full- and part-time statistics show Northern Ireland following a very different pattern from anywhere in Great Britain.
Graph 1: By LA
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Map
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Graph 3: Compared to GB
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Definitions and data sources
The first graph and map show the proportions of employees paid less than £7 per hour by local authority. The data is based on where people live rather than where they work. To improve its statistical reliability, the data is the average for 2005 to 2007. Note that there is no data for Moyle.
The second graph shows, for 2007, how the proportions of employees paid less than £7 per hour in Northern Ireland compares with the regions of Great Britain, with the data shown separately for full-time and part-time workers.
The data source both graphs and map is the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). The proportions have been calculated from the hourly rates at each decile using interpolation to estimate the consequent proportion earning less than £7 per hour.
Overall adequacy of the indicator: limited. ASHE is a large annual survey of employers but, even so, the sample sizes for individual districts are small and thus somewhat unreliable.